Can I Haz Rankings? Oh Yesss!

A little known Google Secret

The only constant about SOE is change. What worked yesterday won’t work today, although it might work tomorrow, but probably not next Thursday, but it might start to work again in June next year – at least until the end of September, when it will stop working again.

While the hottest technique at the moment is the inclusion of Meta Keywords and eigenvectorising internal dynamic latencies, it is only a matter of time until Google’s algorithms change, and new techniques are required – who knows, next year, something as left field as iterative semantic branching or distributive trust methodologies could be the main way of getting to the top of the search results.

I recently had dinner with a top engineer from Google – lets call him Scat Butts, and he revealed that there is a flaw in the Google Algorithm that acts as a kind of Easter Egg, and releases additional functionality without recourse to other techniuques.

While a number of SOE professionals are now aware of the benefits of Meta Keywords Inclusion, few know about the various other Meta tags that are available including one called Meta Robots.

From my understanding of the conversation, the Meta Robots tag is a direct means of communicating with the Googlers who come to your website to decide how they should treat it. If you don’t use it, your page will be confusing to the googler when he comes to read it:

Googler doesn't know what to do without being able to see the Meta Robots

On the other hand, if you do include meta robots, the following will probably happen:

Googlers know what to do with a page when the Meta Robots are included

How to do it…

From my understanding, the actual inclusion of a Meta Robots element in the page is a surprisingly complex act, and it is essential for any SOE who wants to do this to think carefully about what they are doing. The element is broken into the following parts:

Name

This is where you put the name of the robots that you want to target. Thankfully you do not need to know their actual name – Robby, Metal Mickey, Dalek Sec etc, you just need to know the name of the organisation they are from.

In most cases, you will want to instruct all robots to do something, although there are also specific instructions for individual robots that you might want to consider.

Content

This part is where you put the actual instruction. This can be something like “noindex,follow” if you are an entry level user, however power optimisers can also include more specific instructions such as “rank, 1, loans”, which would advise the search engines that you want to rank at position 1 for the keyword loans.

Rank Command

The Rank command only works in Google, and you will need to add a separate line for each term that you want to rank for – Google does not branch these terms semantically, so if you want to rank for both “loan” and “loans”, which is a plural, you will need to add two lines.

One other thing to remember is that the ranking command uses a Dutch auction model to determine where the site should be placed – imagine if more than one person wanted to rank at number one – there would be chaos at the top of the Serps.

In competitive search results, you might need to put in a value for rank of something like 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000124 in order to rank at the top of the results, however for less competitive terms, you might be able to rank at number one with a bid as high as 10001, as not many people know the technique, and as such are not using it yet.

The full code that you need to add to your pages is as follows:

<meta name="robots" content="rank, 1, SOE" />

Happy optimisation – why not post your successes below along with the ranking number that you needed to add for a number one position.